Dr. Kendrick Taylor appreciates the view from his office. Through his window in DRI's Maxey Science Center, Taylor can take in Reno's skyline, the Sierra's snow-capped peaks, and some of the West's bluest skies. It's a sharp contrast to the flat, white, virtually featureless landscape where Taylor has conducted much of his research since 1989 - namely the Greenland Ice Sheet.

In this icy expanse of apparent nothingness, layers and layers of accumulated snow tell the story of yesterday. In projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), drilling through those layers has taken researchers back 80,000 years in time. In his study of the Greenland ice cores, Taylor discovered that in the North Atlantic region, the transition from the last ice age to the present warm period had not taken several centuries, as most scientists had long assumed, but changed completely and utterly in less than a human lifetime. He and his team found that there are thresholds, or trigger points, in the climate system. When one of the thresholds is crossed, climate can change rapidly and unexpectedly. To learn if this holds true worldwide, NSF chose Taylor to lead a new three-year ice-coring project in Antarctica beginning this November.

Taylor began studying ice cores as part of the NSF-funded Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP). Recently, along with DRI colleague Dr. Gregg Lamorey, he finished field work for GISP2, a second coring project that involved a team of about 50 researchers, drillers and support staff.

When snow falls in the accumulation zone of an ice sheet like that of Greenland or Antarctica, there's always a portion of it that doesn't melt or blow away. Instead, it accumulates and is covered by more snow as the years pass. Each annual layer of snow contains a mixture of chemicals absorbed by the snow as it passed through the earth's atmosphere. It also contains dust blown onto the snow's surface, and atmospheric gases that fill the spaces between the snow crystals. As the snow layers are buried deeper and deeper, they turn to ice, trapping and preserving an icy, year-to-year time capsule of climate.

GISP and GISP2 each produced ice cores that were more than three kilometers (1.9 miles) long, with climate records extending back 80,000 years. They reveal when volcanoes erupted and forests burned. They also have something to say about temperature variations, annual precipitation, atmospheric gases like carbon dioxide and methane, wind speeds, and atmospheric circulation patterns. All these things help researchers piece together an amazingly clear picture of how the region's climate has changed over thousands of years.

So, what's the point of all this hindsight and what do we stand to gain from it? "In a nutshell," explains Taylor, "We need to understand the past in order to predict the future." Scientists know that the earth's climate has changed repeatedly in the past, without the influence of humans. But, human activity is a relatively new factor in the business of climate change, and it's important to learn how our actions today might affect climate tomorrow.

"When I first started thinking about climate change," says Taylor, "My attitude was, what's the big deal, it changes gradually, we adjust gradually." But the ice record in Greenland has yielded some very surprising findings, mainly that climate conditions in the region can change in a relative blink of an eye.

"Total climate change, from an ice age to our current warm climate conditions, can occur in about 40 years," says Taylor. "Certain aspects of that climate change, like temperature and snowfall, can shift in less than five years. We've discovered that there is the potential for very large surprises where climate is concerned."

These rapid shifts might be triggered by various climate factors reaching a certain critical point. Like a line in the sand, once that threshold is crossed, things start to happen. For instance, there might be a gradual increase in the amount of river discharge into the ocean. This increase might continue over a period of time with no discernible affect on the climate - until that certain threshold is reached. "Then," says Taylor, "It's like a switch being turned on, and you'll see big changes in ocean circulation, and big changes in climate."

GISP2's startling results have other researchers, particularly climate modelers who create computer simulations to predict future climate fluctuations, rethinking their approaches to climate change. "This ice core inspired some others to look at the possibilities where rapid climate change is concerned," says Taylor. "We've been able to fill in a big piece of the climate puzzle," adds Lamorey. "For example, once these results were published, the people studying marine records took a fresh look at their data and said, $Hey, that's what's going on here, too!' "

To find out if the big climate fluctuations recorded in Greenland are regional or global, Taylor and Lamorey have headed due south for a new drilling project at a different, albeit still white and featureless, site - Antarctica. Taylor is chief scientist and Lamorey is the manager of the Science Coordination Office for the NSF-funded Siple Dome coring project which began in November. Right now, there are 15 different teams of scientist planning to look at various aspects of the core and the surrounding atmosphere/land interactions.

Siple Dome is the first of two coring projects planned for Antarctica and designed to take a good look at the history of the West Antarctic Ice sheet - a body of ice so large and containing so much fresh water that fluctuations in its size and shape over the years would have a large influence on ocean circulation and climate. The Siple Dome ice is 1,000 meters thick (0.6 miles) and is expected to contain ice that is up to 100,000 years old, giving researchers one of the best looks yet at the Antarctic climate record.

That's partly possible, according to Lamorey, because of the big improvements in ice coring research over the past 30 years. "The earliest scientists doing this kind of work were really arctic explorers. For them, just getting there was the big challenge." Now, drilling sites are chosen on their potential to yield the best and most science, instead of the logistics of transportation and accommodations. And, the core itself can now be divided and transported much more efficiently. Most of the scientific teams will have the opportunity to analyze the core - without the high cost of a field season in the polar region.

It's this type of "sharing," according to Taylor, that makes an ice core such a valuable research tool. "The strength of ice coring research is not in the individual measurements of say atmospheric gases or electrical conductivity, but in putting all the pieces together to see the big picture of climate over time. That's when we get the really interesting answers to the big questions."

It seems while the snowy white ends of the earth may not be the best spots to take in the view, they're just the places to go if you want to see clearly into the past - and maybe the future, too.

by Jackie Allen

If it's austral summer, a good part of DRI must be in Antarctica. Winter in the northern hemisphere means it's field season at the South Pole, and DRI has five separate research projects underway in Antarctica.

In addition to Dr. Kendrick Taylor's ice core drilling project, Dr. Robert Wharton and his crew will return again to the dry valleys near McMurdo to work on the National Science Foundation's Long-Term Ecological Research program, and on NASA's study of lifeforms existing on the bottoms of lakes permanently covered with thick ice layers. NASA is interested in these organisms as analogs for discovering potential Martian lifeforms.

Dr. Douglas Lowenthal will also return with graduate student David Mazzera to resume his analyses of the impact of human habitation on the polar continent's air quality. Dr. Nick Lancaster will be working in Antarctica for the first time on a NASA project using Canadian Radarsat data to research how wind moves materials in the cold desert environment.